Film Review - Belfast (12A)

 You know who you are. You're Buddy from Belfast, where everybody knows you.

If you're not from Northern Ireland, there's no particular reason you'd know actor/director Kenneth Branagh hails from Belfast. That's unless maybe you saw him in Graham Reid's 'Billy Plays', the early '80s trio of TV dramas where he played the troubled son of the working-class East Belfast Martin family alongside late great Ulster actor James Ellis. Aged nine Branagh left with his family to travel 'across the water' to England, where he adopted an English accent, so he tells it, in reaction to teasing over the way he talked. Belfast is his lockdown-written passion project, an attempt to get in touch with his roots fifty years on. While a scattering of moments suggest how long he's been away, this is still a crowd-pleasing semi-autobiographical tale, not least due to a great central turn from newcomer Jude Hill.

Young Jude is Buddy, at nine years old the same age as Branagh when the modern Troubles were sparked in Northern Ireland's capital city and beyond. He's the younger son of a warm if bickering Protestant working-class family affected by mounting sectarian turmoil; paramilitary types are threatening scary consequences if the area's Catholic residents don't make themselves scarce. Buddy's Pa (Jamie Dornan) spends time in England as a joiner, trying to ease the family's debt, while his Ma (Catriona Balf - best known to fans of TV drama Outlander) does her best to maintain a sense of calm on the domestic front. Rounding out the family are Buddy's older brother and his beloved Grannie and Pop (played by Dame Judi Dench with a serviceable Norn Iron accent and Ciaran Hinds playing the Best Grandad Ever). Meanwhile the local cinema provides escapism, while Buddy's chief concern amid all the political shenanigans is how to get a seat beside Catherine, the girl he likes a school.

Let's say first that this is not a political film. Anyone seeking enlightenment regarding the reasons behind the Troubles will get as much as a nine-year-old boy could expect to understand. This is first and last a story of childhood and love of home, and how a young lad reacts when that home turns dangerous and chaotic. It's reminiscent in that way of Hope and Glory, John Boorman's 1987 film memoir of his youth in Blitz-torn London. People's lives might be going to hell around him, but for Buddy it's still a place of love and acceptance, adventure even, however scary. Hill, from Gilford, County Down (six miles from my family home) is a pure joy in the role - winsome and authentic, the kind of schoolmate I might have had myself back in the day. He's earnest in his pursuit of romance, hilarious when justifying his viewpoints, and downright heartrending when faced with the threat of having to leave the only community he knows.

Around him orbit that great cast. Balfe is fierce and compassionate as his mother - no disrespect to Dame Judi, but that Best Supporting Oscar nomination should have gone to the younger actress - while Dornan is a real Ulster working-class dad, as far from Christian Grey's tailored suaveness as you could imagine, and clearly loving a role this close to home. The grandparents steal it though, as they're given scope to do. Dench is great, because of course she is. But Hinds is the grown-up performer you'll remember most clearly - grandfatherly wisdom, humour and kindness emanating from the heart and the gut, showing off the best of Branagh's writing, while showcasing what an outstanding actor this man has been decades.

Belfast is, as the film's name suggests, a character in itself. The Tigers Bay estate of Branagh's youth was recreated brick by brick in Berkshire, lockdown restrictions having prevented use of the location itself. The production team did a great job - central to Belfast's success is the reminiscence of a time and place, one that's rooted in the set's very foundations, showing in the fashions and the wallpaper, the Subbuteo and the biscuit tins. This is the '60s, the working-class Northern Irish variety, and I'm guessing those who lived there through that era will feel it in every shot. The film's pristine black and white only serves to enhance that sense of childhood memory, with technicolor used sparingly to highlight very particular moments of wonder. 

I have nitpicks with the film - things that prevent me from scoring it higher. A third-act plot beat that feels a bit too daft to fit with the overall tone. A Van Morrison song that however touching is several decades out of place. A later sequence that's somewhere between fantasy and reality and that didn't quite land for me - not on a first watch at any rate.

I'm going to push those things aside though, because overall this is terrific - a memorable rites of passage tale from a writer-director getting in touch with his past through the inevitably wonky medium of memory. Belfast has universal resonance in its portrayal of familial bonds and painfully fractured community, but it will hit home most profoundly, I think, for those viewers who lived it - whether they left or stayed. 

Gut Reaction: I grew up later than Buddy in a town called Lurgan and this wasn't exactly my family, but Belfast did make me feel my own childhood - a lot. 

Memorable Moment: The family cinema outing - they showed that film in our Primary School every damn year!

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. As a recollection of childhood, place and era this is a huge success - warm, funny, and inevitably tinged with sadness. Those who criticise it for not being more 'Troubled' miss the point. When you're nine years old, you work with what you're given, just like Buddy does.